Denver Public Safety Manager Ron Perea, right, listens to listens to a question from civil rights attorney Joe Salazar during a community meeting at NEWSED Community Development Corporation in Denver, CO, August 19, 2010. Prominent Denver Latinos today demanded the resignation of the cityÕs new safety manager, saying that his decision to keep on the force two police officers accused of covering up the beating a 23-year-old Latino shows he is unfit for the office. Perea met with about 50 leaders and members of the Latino and African American communities today to defend his decision to allow the officers to keep their jobs despite a video that shows Michael DeHerrera getting tackled to the ground and beaten for doing nothing but talking on a cell phone.

Two lawsuits filed within the last week in federal court accuse the Denver Police Department of racial bias.

In the first case, a Mexican man in the country lawfully claims police officers last year wrongly accused him of being an illegal immigrant and held him in jail for five days, causing him to lose his job.

The man, Jose Sanchez, says officers treated him rudely after handcuffing him, accused him of possessing a fake ID and unlawfully entered and searched his girlfriend’s apartment without a warrant.

The charges against Sanchez were later dropped, according to the lawsuit.

“Denver police need to base their policing on evidence, not biased stereotypes and they need to respect the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches and seizures,” Mark Silverstein — the legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado, which is representing Sanchez — said in a statement.

Denver Police spokesman Sonny Jackson said the department received a complaint about the encounter but said, when investigators tried to unravel the incident, the person complaining was uncooperative. He said he couldn’t comment further on the lawsuit.

In the second case, two African-American men accuse officers of pulling them over in 2009 for no reason, then making them sit on the sidewalk for 45 minutes in sub-freezing weather.

The men say officers accused them of being gang members and used racial epithets to taunt them. Charges stemming from the stop were ultimately dismissed, with the judge describing the officers’ actions as “extreme, profane and racially motivated,” according to the suit.

Last year, the men, Ashford Wortham and Cornelius Campbell, won a $24,000 settlement from the city in a separate suit alleging city officials wrongly withheld records from the internal police investigation of the traffic stop.

At the time of that settlement, police said an internal investigation could not sustain allegations of police misconduct because inverstigators couldn’t determine who was telling the truth.

The city has yet to formally respond to either of the new lawsuits.

Lawsuits against the Denver Police Department are not uncommon. There have been seven lawsuits filed so far this year in federal court accusing Denver police officers of wrongdoing. One of those has already been dismissed.

Between 2004 and September of last year, the Denver Police Department was sued in state and federal court 185 times, according to a report presented to City Council members last year. In that time, the city paid more than $6 million total to settle a number of those suits.

Of the cases that were not settled, 64 were dismissed, eight were decided in favor of the city and six were decided for the plaintiffs.

So far this year, two excessive force cases filed in previous years have been decided in favor of the city.

As news of the deadly mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, unfolded last week, Pia Guerra, a 46-year-old Vancouver-based artist, felt helpless. She couldn’t bring herself to go to sleep, so she began to draw.

Police who find suspected drugs during a traffic stop or an arrest usually pause to perform a simple task: They place some of the material in a vial filled with liquid. If the liquid turns a certain color, it’s supposed to confirm the presence of cocaine, heroin or other narcotics.